Earth Day

An estimated twenty million Americans took part in the first Earth Day on
April 22, 1970. Virtually every community from Maine to California hosted
activities. Congress adjourned for the day. All the television networks
gave it significant coverage. In New York, hundreds of thousands of people
jammed Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth Street all the way to Central Park to
listen to politicians, scientists, and celebrities. In San Jose,
California, college students held a funeral for the internal combustion
engine, and buried a new car.

An Earth flag is being held by a member of the crowd at the Capitol
Building in Washington D.C., for Earth Day 1990.

Earth Day arrived at the close of the 1960s—a time of cultural and
political turmoil. At its core was a growing recognition that
unconstrained growth could produce a legacy of poisoned streams, filthy
air, urban blight, and vanishing wilderness. Earth Day tied these issues,
and a wide array of other concerns, together under the environmental
banner and greatly magnified their clout and visibility. It is generally
cited as marking the birth of the modern U.S. environmental movement.

Initially, some activists worried that environmental concerns might
undermine other causes, such as peace and civil rights. This did not
happen. Indeed, with its successful reengagement of the politically
alienated middle class, Earth Day arguably helped revitalize a civil
society that was becoming a bit frayed by violence at the end of the
1960s.

The roots of Earth Day can be traced to a speech given by Democratic
Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson at the University of Washington in
September of 1969. Decrying a large oil spill in Santa Barbara as
emblematic of environmental problems, he called for a
teach-in
on the environment at colleges across the country, modeled on the earlier
anti–Vietnam War teach-ins.

Senator Nelson repeated variations of this speech over the next few months
to enthusiastic audiences. Based on that response, he created a nonprofit
organization to organize the campaign. He invited Republican Congressman
Pete McCloskey to cochair the board, and asked Denis Hayes, a politically
active recent graduate of Stanford University, to serve as National
Coordinator.

Hayes quickly rented some ramshackle offices and assembled the core
national staff. Eventually, the Washington, D.C.–based staff grew
to about sixty, supplemented by a few hundred, mostly youthful volunteers.
Some had been active in politics as supporters of Gene McCarthy, Robert
Kennedy, or John Lindsay. Others were drawn from the
counterculture
, and were interested in recycling, organic food, solar power, and
alternatives to the automobile. Under the pressure of an April 22
deadline, this diverse group put their differences aside and forged a very
effective team.

In early 1970 this small group of young people, most in their early
twenties, made a series of decisions that were to shape and propel the
environmental movement through the next few decades.

The name "Earth Day" was chosen by Hayes and his staff over
beer and pizza one night for use in a full-page ad in the Sunday
New York Times.
Julian Koenig, the New York advertising executive who designed the ad for
free, proposed Earth Day (his favorite) along with numerous other
candidate names (Environment Day, Ecology Day, E Day) in other mockups of
the ad. The ad, headlined "Earth Day: The Beginning,"
elicited enormous attention in the media.

Having watched other social movements of the 1960s grow exclusionary with
the passage of time, Earth Day's organizers explicitly set out to
engage the huge middle class that they saw as the fulcrum of American
politics. They reached out to labor (organized labor was the largest
source of financial support for Earth Day); K–12 education groups
(NEA, AFT, and NSTA); civic and religious groups; and national
associations of zoos, museums, and libraries. They took special care to
cultivate strong relationships with women's groups such as the
League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women,
PTAs, garden clubs, and the scouts. All were approached and urged to
mobilize their huge networks of members across the country.

As the
New York Times
described the resulting campaign: "Conservatives were for it.
Liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans and independents were for it.
So were the ins, the outs, the Executive and Legislative branches of
government."

As the Earth Day campaign grew, an enormous range of issues emerged from
the
grassroots
. These included health-damaging levels of air pollution, the misuse of
pesticides (raised earlier by Rachel Carson in her landmark book,
Silent Spring
), freeways cutting through vibrant urban neighborhoods,
defoliation
resulting from the use of
mutagenic
herbicides in Vietnam, the explosive growth of the human population, the
flushing of raw sewage and industrial wastes into the nation's
rivers and the Great Lakes, massive clear cutting of the national forests,
the environmental impacts of a proposed new
supersonic
airliner (the SST), and others. To tie all these complex issues together,
Earth Day's organizers urged that the lessons of ecology—the
study of the interrelationship of all creatures with their
environment—be employed to create sustainable human environments.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from
republicans and democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers,
tycoons and labor leaders. The size and coverage of Earth Day led
President Richard Nixon (who was no fan of the environmental movement, but
who
expected Senator Ed Muskie, an environmental leader, to be his opponent
in the 1972 election) to propose the creation of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA).

The tough Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed with only a handful of
dissenting votes in both houses of Congress. Seven of a "Dirty
Dozen" congressmen—so designated by the Earth Day
organizers—were defeated in the 1970 elections. The military was
forced to halt the use of mutagenic defoliants in Southeast Asia.
Development of the SST was halted. The Federal Occupational Health and
Safety Act aimed at "in-plant pollution" was passed by a
coalition of labor and environmental groups. Within the next few years,
such landmarks as the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act were passed by wide margins.

Seldom, if ever, has a new issue so broadly and swiftly permeated the
nation. Within a couple of years, the environment was influencing almost
every aspect of American business, politics, law, education, culture, and
lifestyle.

As 1990 approached, and again before 2000, environmental leaders asked
Denis Hayes to organize anniversary campaigns. In 1990 Earth Day turned
its attention overseas, ultimately catalyzing events in 141 countries.
Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped
pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro—the largest gathering of heads of state in history.

An estimated 200 million participants in 184 nations took part in Earth
Day 2000, which included the first national environmental campaign in the
history of China. Earth Day 2000 focused on global warming and low-carbon
energy alternatives. It helped create worldwide political support to
implement the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 2001 over the strong
opposition of the first Bush administration.

Earth Day has evolved into the first global secular holiday. Much as
Americans use the occasion of Labor Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King
Day, and other holidays to reflect on important issues, people everywhere
now take time each April 22 to reflect on the health of the planet, and to
ask what they can do in their jobs and their lives to improve it. A
coordinating body, the Earth Day Network, promotes and coordinates
activities among thousands of participating organizations from every
corner of the planet.